"Pink Flamingos" is the greatest film ever made

[StevePulaski]

"Pink Flamingos" is the greatest film ever made

Steve Pulaski's Foreword: While I don't believe I ever openly stated this in a blog or a review, I detest labels like "the greatest film of all time" or "the best film of all time." It's a nonsensical, needless debate over who can yell the loudest, for it exists of nothing more than people trying to answer an objective question with solely subjective answers because no other type of answer exists. As of 2014, Citizen Kane holds the top spot on the American Film Institute's list of greatest motion pictures, but what is the American Film Institute? A committee of people who worked to compile a list of the greatest motion pictures and elected one-hundred to fill the list. Despite the committee being renowned and cherished, it's all still an opinion and nothing more.

I refrain from digging too much deeper into this subject because I want to discuss it on a forthcoming episode of "The Front Row Steve Podcast," the podcast I do for The Baconation. Currently, however, I was forced to answer what I felt was the greatest film of all time in my mass media and society class, a three-week long course I'm taking over my winter break from college. It's the sole writing assignment of the class and couldn't be any longer than five-hundred words. While I love film and everything about it, I hated that I was going to need to give a response to such a question.

While I took the assignment seriously, acknowledging the rubric and adhering to the professor's guidelines, I wanted to have fun with this assignment. I could've chosen any film under the sun, but I wanted to pick one that was going to stun people and make for an incredibly intriguing read; I wanted a challenge or, employing a better term, a writing exercise. I chose John Waters' controversial Pink Flamingos, and anyone who has witnessed (not watched) that film knows just how outlandish of a choice that film is for an assignment like this. Transgressive, tasteless, trashy, and filled with more sexual fetishes and taboos than a website dedicated to those things, Pink Flamingos, to me, is just as good as any pick for this particular assignment. My goal was to justify it and try to make my own case, while referencing three other film critics, as to why the film deserves the dubious title.

I await a response from my professor; rarely have I wanted one so badly.

Read the full blog here, stevepulaski.blogspot.com/2014/12/pink-flamingos-is-greatest-film-ever.html